Like this:

My project is, as an instructional designer to work with Subject Matter Experts, to build structured lessons that help students learn the open source software and build a functional product. These lessons will be provided in a MOOC format free and open to everyone. The lessons will be a combination of open educational resources, lectures, demonstration, assessments, hands on activities, and peer evaluations.

Although the focus of this project is to produce an Introduction to WordPress MOOC, there is a strong desire to produce two additional WordPress MOOCs and then look at other open source software.

One of the problems I see in education is a void in how to learn new software, especially open source software. Typically there is a great community around open source software and they tend to produce great resources; but if you are new to the software often times you don’t even know where to start or what questions you should be asking. This makes the software difficult to learn, people are left on their own to navigate and piece together so many great resources. Sometimes training and support can be purchased, but if you are just learning the software and don’t know if it will even meet your needs, it may not make sense to purchase training for free software.

Like many people my first though was the world has changed and of course we need to raise the bar on educational expectations. But then I began to think about it a little more closely. I work in a community college and 70% of incoming freshman are not college ready and this is not unique to my institutions. We spend a great deal of time often a year or more getting students to the college level. This proposal suddenly looks more like an attempt to fix a broken k-12 system than raising the bar.

The second thing that jumps out at me has more to do with the funding than the merits of the proposal. Under the proposal the president has made 25% of the funding would come from the states. My community college is in Illinois and currently the state has difficulties meeting its financial obligations to higher ed. Many of the community colleges in this state has struggled greatly due to this. I can’t image the state being able to take on this new responsibility.